


The Senses Prompts (Sherlock Holmes Book Canon Edition)

by stardust_made



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Character Study, Light Angst, M/M, POV First Person, Pining, Senses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-14
Updated: 2015-06-14
Packaged: 2018-04-04 09:04:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4131864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stardust_made/pseuds/stardust_made
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sound, Smell, Touch, Taste, Sight. Watson reflects.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Senses Prompts (Sherlock Holmes Book Canon Edition)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hardboiledbaby](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hardboiledbaby/gifts).
  * Translation into Русский available: [Язык чувств (О канонном Шерлоке Холмсе)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14114040) by [Little_Unicorn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Little_Unicorn/pseuds/Little_Unicorn)



> For [hardboiledbaby](http://archiveofourown.org/users/hardboiledbaby/pseuds/hardboiledbaby) with gratitude for her donation for [](http://fandomaid.livejournal.com/profile)[](fandomaid.livejournal.com/)**fandomaid** 's Help Nepal campaign. Thank you for your generosity, I hope you enjoy this!♥
> 
> Beta by the lovely, lovely [Canon_Is_Relative](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Canon_Is_Relative/pseuds/Canon_Is_Relative).

_Sound_

I have never been a man who relies heavily on his auditory experiences. My hearing is just fine and it has served me well, especially in the last three years of my life. I have indeed had my fair share of danger while following Sherlock Holmes on his adventures and it has proven essential for one’s survival that one should be able to pick up on the lightest sound produced by man: a creaking floorboard or even the smallest exhalation. How fortunate, I sometimes reflect, that while my days filled with gunfire and explosion may have damaged my body to some extent, no damage has been done to my hearing, not permanently.

But that does not mean I am a man with an acute sense of sound. Holmes sometimes chastises me that I hear but I don’t listen—true, not as often as he expresses his exasperation about my other shortcomings. This may very well be the case, but as far as my listening is concerned I see no way around it. I could never explain to him the peculiar experience of processing sounds through my auditory canals—a long speech, a part of a symphony, a lecture—and not quite succeeding in capturing it fully. In my early days as a student of medicine I used to find listening to my professors rather difficult, until I began sitting closer to the speaker to focus on the way his lips shaped around the words and his hands conducted the sentences’ meanings. Unless there are details picked up by another sensory channel to accompany the more complex auditory stimuli, my ears may pick up sound with perfect clarity but then my mind ends up just a step behind, chasing after it and trying to decipher it into wholesome meaning with varied success.

Holmes adores good music and takes me to concerts more frequently than I would like to be taken to them. He loses himself in the music and hardly pays me any attention, which is much to my benefit. My mind is free to wander off, leaving musical notes and compositions far behind—a background noise that is sometimes pleasant, but can occasionally become a vaguely irritating distraction. 

The other evening he was in a mood I am still at a loss to describe. I do not profess to know what provoked it, either. In a few clipped words he ordered me to take my place in my chair then proceeded to draw the curtains and extinguish all light, too. He moved about the room picking up his violin and positioning himself right across from me, all of which he did without disturbing a single object. (He is very feline, and cats do seem to treat the night as a spacious womb.)

Then he went on to play a very complicated piece of music for fifteen minutes. 

I could not see him at first, or anything else. In time my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, but he was still only the barest outline: a different shade of black on a black canvas. It was terribly disorienting. It also began presenting a great strain on my eyes. I have always slept with my curtains open, needing the different shades of night to keep infiltrating my room and make it a distinguishable place. For a while I listened, stranded at sea, unnerved by Holmes’s unexpected actions, lost without my trusted sense of sight; grappling to find purchase in the sound of Holmes’s violin and failing.

Until I closed my eyes and let the music capture me, instead. Deprived of any visual pointers, having to sit still, ensconced by the familiarity of my armchair, I let go and followed the tune mindlessly. There was no longer the inner pressure to keep in step with it, and it was a liberating feeling. I did not try to listen—I listened. The elusive, blurred images of a pair of pale, graceful hands flashed through my mind’s eye and it was enough.

***

_Smell_

There will never be anything to chase away the smell of war from my nostrils, not fully. Holmes works murder cases as often as he doesn’t; occasionally, there are gruesome sights we need to face and examine, the smells that come with them matching what our eyes perceive. They don’t bother me greatly—I would not have become a physician if they did. But blood smells differently when spilled from the wound of a soldier on the battlefield. Death smells differently there. Perhaps I hope that with time, my frequent encounters with both in some pastoral setting, or at least in one where this sort of smell is still a shock, will finally erase the sense memory of it back then.

Or perhaps I just pray that one day my sense of smell will succumb to the assault of poisonous fumes and noxious gases and never bother me again with those memories. Sherlock Holmes is a chemist at heart, at skill, at occupation. He sometimes mixes substances purely for the sake of it—an extraordinary thing coming from a man who has a singular focus on purpose. (I have no real wish to attempt interpreting what it says about his nature that he seems to work with incendiary agents so frequently. I only smile to myself when I hear people describe him as cold.) Our shared household never seems to be entirely free of the traces left by some smell, be it the result of his chemical experiments or something prone to rotting hidden from our eyes in the indescribable mess our living quarters can become. My clothes hardly ever manage to preserve the smell of freshly cleaned cotton, wool, or linen, much to my regret. Neither do his garments or our cushions, the throws or the curtains. It is always lingering behind, some unorthodox scent or other. Our stoic landlady must have begun to treat her seasonal allergies and frequent attacks of sinusitis as a blessing in disguise. I am used to the smells just as I am used to all of Holmes’s peculiarities.

There is one thing that is absolved of them, more often than not: his skin. I have come close enough to be able to pick up on its scent quite a few times since I first set foot on Baker Street. One may say too close and too often, but when two gentlemen involve themselves in activities that require them to lurk together in confined spaces, what constitutes ‘too close proximity’ becomes harder to establish. No one would ask anyway; it is almost always just the two of us. 

Holmes smells divinely. It is confounding considering what he gets up to. I must confess that this could be a matter of subjectivity on my part. I haven’t noticed anyone else covertly inhale deeply when near him.

***

_Touch_

My hands are one of my greatest tools in my interactions with the world. I am a doctor: I prod, I press, I cut, I feel about. I also rub in, bandage, and stitch. My aim is excellent, even from a great distance—my fingers feel in place around a handgun, my palm doesn’t sweat, my wrist and arm don’t fall victims to tremors.

Everyone who is familiar with my stories about my life with Sherlock Holmes would think I was the more tactile one; a thought very likely driven by the common conception that temper and sentiment are conducive to a more physical form of expression. But they would be wrong. I do trust my hands and need them as the gates through which the world comes in in an orderly fashion, in a manner I can understand. But Holmes is the far more tactile one of us. Propriety has prevented me from mentioning in my accounts the countless ways in which his hands prey on me every day. They guide me on my way as if I were blind or lacking a basic sense of space—steering me in this or that direction, pressing against my back or squeezing lightly around my elbow. Holmes’s fingers close around my wrist with alarming ease and eloquence, conveying a spectrum of commands and wishes. (Alas, some commands and wishes are omitted from that spectrum, even if I would gladly accept either.) My friend’s hands are so often dancing over me in a series of brief touches designed to achieve a particular task such as draw my attention to something, or simply have it for himself, that I would be forgiven if I thought I was constantly hiding some really innovative murder weapon on my person that Holmes endeavoured to uncover.

I say his hands prey on me for his touch leaves me weaker, more often than not. (I should make a point of speaking of those instances when a hand on the shoulder or on my brow did give me strength, instead. Night terrors have plagued me since my return from Afghanistan with indiscriminate frequency; fever has sought to ravage my body once or twice, too, over the last few years, and his touch was there in my semi-lucid state to ground me and to remind me not of what I could lose but of what I already had.) 

I touch Holmes more rarely and it is mostly out of necessity. I avoid it if I can and if I remember to. I am an enduring fellow by nature, but everything has its limits.

***

_Taste_

In the privacy of my mind, I fantasize about kissing Holmes. 

It happens when I find myself safe in the solitude of my bed—a prelude to sleep that is surprisingly peaceful. I close my eyes and give myself over to flights of fancy of what his mouth would taste like. If I have had a glass of something before retiring to my bed, my imagination provides me with a more vivid mixture. There is the sensation of the brush of our lips. The taste of his tongue tangling with mine or scraping deliberately languid over it; the taste of his mouth, that taste of intimacy like no other. I do not possess his scientist’s brain. I don’t attempt to break down what he would taste like and neither do I care to do it. I crave the taste of him. It is unfathomable to me that I would not like it, or wouldn’t shake with need to have even more of it. 

Desire does that. It transforms reality to something highly subjective that is powerful and somehow unifying every stimulus, every perception into a new, singular experience. Holmes might object to that notion with cool reasoning or with vehemence, depending on his mood, but I stand by it: a balding head or a taste of tobacco can be woven into the person’s attractiveness by desire; twice so, by desire that suffocates in lack of fulfillment. I should know. 

***

_Sight_

Of all my senses, my eyes are my first, most trusted port of call in perceiving the world. Holmes has resigned himself that I shall always see, but never observe. But I do see, in my own ways that I have no qualms to fully comprehend. 

I see Holmes, and to see him is to love him.


End file.
